(0:00) The Besties welcome Tony Robbins! (0:23) Tony's background and how it led to his career (8:19) Why progress correlates to happiness, state of the younger generation, biochemistry studies (21:53) SSRIs, psychedelics, importance of personal...
Loading summary
Host
Our next guest needs no introduction. Tony Robbins.
Tony Robbins
You have to figure that, like I always say, if you want to take the island, you burn the boats. I got a chance to work with the President of the United States, Clinton. And he calls me one day, true story. And says, tony, they're gonna impeach me in the morning. How many of you ever achieved a goal you worked your guts out for and then achieved it and went, is this all there is?
Guest 1
Horrific. Horrible.
Host
It's great to meet you.
Tony Robbins
Thank you.
Host
You're bigger in person. You're a big man compared to what a normal human.
Tony Robbins
Okay.
Host
You're large.
Guest 1
You're like two.
Tony Robbins
You see your hands?
Host
Yeah, there you go.
Tony Robbins
There you go.
Host
It's like you're a big guy.
Guest 1
You're glad he just said his hand.
Host
It could have gotten really interesting.
Tony Robbins
True, true.
Host
I mean, maybe not if he was in the cold plunge. You never know. Okay, enough. When I told people you were coming.
Tony Robbins
Yes.
Host
I got like a range of responses. And your poor assistant chief of staff is in a total panic about all the questions I'm gonna ask you.
Tony Robbins
I don't care.
Host
Yes, I know you don't care, but I got the range of the infomercial guy. He has had a profound impact on my life. From very significant friends of mine who we know in common who have been to your seminars to. He's kind of a guru. Self help, it's all kind of like snake oil. I want to know where this all started, because my perception of you was the late night when I was growing up in the 80s, the infomercials. And then I looked into it and I started looking into the self help space. You actually were inspired by a self help guru who you went to work for in the, I think the late 70s.
Tony Robbins
Yeah, Jim Rohn.
Host
Yeah, Jim Rohn. And you have been on this for a while. And a lot of the techniques that you studied are very real. These are real techniques in psychology. And when I looked at them, and I was looking at the history of it, you look at Ralph Waldo Emerson, self reliance, Freud, Jung, nlp, neuro, linguistic programming, and even L. Ron Hubbard, who took it in a different direction. A lot of these self help things.
Guest 1
Are you getting to a question?
Host
I am, I am. He wants to show you that he.
Guest 2
Spent two hours on Wikipedia before we started.
Host
I went down the rabbit hole. Rabbit hol, Tony Robbins. And why did you get addicted to all this self help stuff? And then it's kind of been packaged in a couple different ways in your life. So I'm curious This sort of arc of how you got into this and then what you do for people now, because my friend Mark Pincus, and then we have Benioff, a friend of the show, my friend Kevin Rose, these guys, and then civilians. One of my wife's friends goes and runs over coals with you in Hawaii, and she's a makeup artist and she loves it and she can't shut up about it. So tell me how you got into self help, how you packaged it, and why you decided to be a coach and do these seminars instead of starting a cult or religion.
Tony Robbins
I got. Unpack that.
Guest 1
Yes, please.
Tony Robbins
Well, people know me at different stages. I was on television every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day for about 12 years during infomercial days. And I hated infomercials. But there was no real vehicle you could get out to a mass number of people other than writing a book. And most people don't read. But it started for me. I grew up in a pretty tough environment. I was born in downtown. I had four different fathers. I had a very powerful mom who I love dearly, has since passed. Beautiful soul. I created a lot of my success to her, but also when she drank alcohol and took prescription drugs, she was a different person, very violent. I have a younger brother, younger sister. So I really became a practical psychologist in my youth, learning how to manage her emotions in her states and how to really get things done. And then probably the thing that changed my life the most, though, was when I was 11 years old, my fourth father, and he got fired from his job. And it was Thanksgiving. We had no money and no food. When I say no food, we had crackers and peanut butter, but, you know, not a Thanksgiving dinner, which kind of depressing. And my parents were fighting and, you know, saying things you can never take back. And I was trying to make my brother and sister not hear it. And my life was changed because someone came to the door. I opened it, big guy, two bags of groceries in his hand and an un. A frozen turkey uncooked in a pan on the ground. He'd obviously carried in and sat down. He said, is your father here? And I was like, just one moment. And I thought it was going to be the most joyous moment. But my father was angry because he felt humiliated. He looked at it as charity and said, we don't accept that. Long story short, the man said, I'm the delivery guy. And my dad had to take the food. And that day changed my life because my father left shortly thereafter. And I really loved him. He's the one who adopted me and I carry his name. But it also. Our life is determined, I think, by the meanings we give to things. You know, is this the end or the beginning? Is this person dissing me? Are they coaching me? Are they loving on me? What? Whatever you decide controls your life. And I was fortunate enough at that point that I came up with a different meaning. We grew up in an environment I thought was a wealthy community. It was very low middle class to say the least. And we were on the other side of the railroad tracks and it looked like nobody cared. And nobody. My father kept saying no one cares about anybody else. But this was new evidence for me. It was like, if a stranger who doesn't even want credit is delivering my family Thanksgiving dinner, then strangers do care and I need to care about strangers. And so I promised myself that at 11 years old that someday I'd do this back and feed at least two families. And then, you know, I grew up and I started studying patterns. I started seeing that everything is a pattern. You know, all of you know, as you're an investor, if you're a great CEO, if you're a great dancer, musician, it's really because you recognize patterns, things are no longer chaos for you. You see what's going on. So you have the power of anticipation. And then the second skill, I think I try to teach this to all my kids and grandkids. I have five kids and five grandkids. I have a 50 year old daughter and thanks to Covid, a four year old daughter. And I'm thinking, what do I need them to know? The world is changing so fast. They have to be able to recognize patterns. Step two, utilize them. That's where power is. And if you do it long enough, you play someone else's music long enough, you know, some of you starts to come through and you start to be a creator of patterns. That's when you come masterful. Those are the people we know in investing, you know, all their names or in business or anything else. And so once I learned that, I realized there's nothing wrong with people. We just get caught up in patterns and we do them so long we think they're us. And it's hard to change you easy to change a pattern. And I got really good at it. And so I changed my body, I changed my finances. People started coming to me. And then gradually it became my full time focus and I began to have people calling me as I started producing results. And I'd get these athletes that would call, like Serena Williams and she's melting down and she can't get on the court because her sister just died and she's lost recently and she's, you know, she's got gun shy and I got to right now turn her around and there's no net. So fortunately, I've been able to do that over and over again and built my career and brought me to a lot of sports teams and I own some of those sports teams, pieces of them. And. But then I also started looking. Okay, I started working with people that are depressed and suicidal and knock on wood, I don't know. Did any of you see Tony Robbins I'm not yout Guru on Netflix? Anybody here? So if you haven't seen it, you can see. Thank you. You see the work, but we follow up 10 years later and you see the people are still in great shape because we're rewiring the way the brain works. It's not a bunch of pump up. I do use energy because without energy, nothing changes. But you can't just have energy. You need strategy. And so as I did that, you know, I'll give you a perfect example. I'm 31 years old and career is starting to soar. And then I, I got a chance to work with the President, United States, Clinton. And he calls me one day, true story, and says, tony, they're going to impeach me in the morning. What should I do? I'm 31 years old. The President asked me, I said, could you call me sooner? You know, this is like tomorrow morning. But because there's no net, my brain figured it out. You have to figure it out. It's like I always say, if you want to take the island, you burn the boats. And then I got good at.
Guest 1
Sorry, Tony. What did you tell him?
Tony Robbins
Pardon me?
Guest 1
What did you tell him?
Tony Robbins
I can't tell you that.
Guest 1
Okay.
Tony Robbins
That's a private thing. I'll tell you if you want to know. I don't share unless somebody shares. But what I will tell you is I got good then at studying businesses and became an entrepreneur. And so Now I have 114 companies and massively different industries, but we do about $9 billion, a little bit more in revenue. And I love the diversity. So I get to work with athletes. I get the team you have formerly had ownership in. I have a little piece of. Peter Guber is one of my dearest friends, as you probably know. And so I've gotten to work with, you know, some of the greatest athletes in the world, some of the greatest musicians, some of the greatest entertainers and the greatest entrepreneurs. And I don't go there just to teach.
Guest 1
Can I ask you a societal question for a second?
Tony Robbins
Sure.
Guest 1
Okay. So you've been in some ways diagnosing what ails people for let's say 40 years now.
Tony Robbins
Yes.
Guest 1
Every society has its own pothole. And maybe, you know, teenagers and young people today suffer from a very different thing that maybe Jason, myself and Freeberg did at our ages. Can you diagnose the level of happiness and sadness and satisfaction, dissatisfaction that this current young generation has relative to other younger generations and where it's different and where it's the same?
Tony Robbins
I don't think I'm the only one who can see it. I think expectations. You know, I always tell people expectations are what make you really unhappy. And we can't not have any, obviously, but trade your expectations for appreciation. Your life changes. But our expectations now are controlled more by social media, especially that generation. Right? So they're seeing people that are incredibly wealthy and thinking that's who I should be and feeling like they don't have anything. I mean, what turned people in the Soviet Union against Soviet Union? When they got access to seeing how the Westerners lived, then things changed. When they didn't see it, it was okay. So today we compare ourselves to others in ways that are not real. Because like young girls that go on social media have seen all the studies. I'm sure they get depressed because they're comparing to images that aren't even real. It's fake.
Host
Expectations minus reality equals happiness.
Tony Robbins
And what I really say is progress equals happiness. Like if you are growing, if you are going at some, even if you're not there yet and you are going to lose £50 and you lose the first five or ten, or you're in a relationship and you finally face what has to be dealt with or you face your finances, There's a momentum that happens and aliveness. I mean, ask all of you here and those of you in the room, how many of you ever achieved a goal you worked your guts out for and then achieved it? Went, is this all there is? Who's had this experience? I'm curious, right? That's a horrific moment.
Guest 1
Horrible.
Tony Robbins
It's worse than failure because most of us simply fail. We get back up and figure it out, right? But try this on for size. How many of you achieved a goal that you worked your guts out for and you're really proud of it and you were euphoric. Who's had one of those well showed handsome noise out there? If you give it to Me later. Right. So the question is, how long did that good feeling last? Did it last six years?
Guest 1
No, a year.
Host
How old are you? Euphoria?
Tony Robbins
Six months?
Guest 1
Six minutes?
Host
Ten minutes?
Tony Robbins
Yeah. Six weeks?
Host
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
Six minutes.
Host
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
For most people it's been six minutes and about six weeks I found.
Host
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
And so why is that? We're meant to grow in life? You grow or you die. The whole universe, you know my laws. You grow or you die. And when you grow, you have something to give. And unless you're giving something beyond yourself, if it's always a trade, you don't have any esteem for yourself, you don't have any inner pride. But when you have something to give, that's when life feels more meaningful.
Guest 2
Yeah. Jonathan Height's book from years ago, the Happiness Hypothesis.
Tony Robbins
Yes.
Guest 2
He had a great study in there on economic progress being the best predictor of happiness. It wasn't the absolute dollars you were earning each year that flatlined after a certain baseline standard of living. Beyond that standard of living, once you're able to get food and housing and all the things you need to survive and thrive. What predicted happiness was how much things changed from year to year to year, the rate of change.
Tony Robbins
He's absolutely right in other studies. But there are new studies that add another dynamic. It's also affected by who is in your environment and today who's in your environment because of social media. It's not real. And so now we're in a place where people evaluate not by their circle of friends they hang out with. That certainly plays a role, but even more so. And I've always tell people, if you want to grow, get on the field of people tenfold of where you are. And if you want to play tennis and you're good at tennis and you're fortunate enough to get sit down with somebody who's world class, like a Serena Williams friend of mine. If you go out and do that, you know you're terrible. But just to get on the court with her, you got to get great. If you play against somebody you're better than, it's only a matter of time before your skills go down as well. So I think our society people have an expectation today also, my original teacher, Jim Rohn, a personal development speaker, more of a business philosopher, he I went to him one time when I was really young, just beginning with him, and I said, all my fathers are good humans. Why were we always broke? And I said, and I look at this, you know, billionaire hedge fund person and he made a billion dollars last year. And this School teacher only made those days like $40,000. And he said, tony, that's fair, but here's what I can suggest to you. We're all equal as souls, but we're not equal in the marketplace. And he said, if you go to McDonald's and you don't get a living wage, you're not supposed to. It's a first job. Anyone can do that job and learn it in an hour. But he said, if you find a way to add more value to people. Because he said to me, can someone make twice as much money in the same time? I said, yeah, five times, ten hundred times, yeah. He said, the guy that made a billion dollars produced a 42% return. Did you know that those were people's futures? That was people's college educations, that was their retirements. He is worth it. You must become assessed on doing more for others than anybody else does. And so that's been my moniker for all my companies and it's been the core. And I think that's what's missing. To answer your question, it's like, what is life going to give me versus the Kennedy days of don't ask what you're going to do, but how do.
Guest 1
We, how do we help a larger swath of society than unwind the addiction to SSRIs, the kind of doom loop, doom scrolling. Like just the general malaise.
Tony Robbins
Yes.
Guest 1
That then manifests in all these weird ways. The inability to talk to each other, the, you know, cut people off because they voted one way versus another. All this stuff just seems so because.
Guest 2
All of the social media, the mobile, the social media, everything's not going away. It's here, it's permeated and it's not just going to disappear overnight.
Tony Robbins
But if you study like the youngest generation, as they've come forward, they're getting off of even. They've obviously got a Facebook. A long time ago, their parents do that stuff, right. But they're not even Instagram now. They're going to these individual places that are more intimate. They're wanting not everybody to know what they're doing. The pendulum throws itself so extreme and then we correct. It's what we just experienced politically, it's the same thing. So it's, it's easy to rationalize that. But I'll tell you, you know, Stanford came in during the COVID time, the period, and they came to me because two of their professors had gone through my date with Destiny 7. It's a five day total immersion where you rewire yourself, decide what you Want I don't tell you what your values are. How are you going to live your life? And both of them had been on medication, both were clinically depressed. And they came back, he said, they have no symptoms. They're off all their medication. How does this happen? So we had this long conversation. He said, well, do you have some data? I said, well, I have millions of graduates, you know, stories. He goes, no, no, like scientific data. I said, no, but I'd be open to doing a study. So during COVID Oh, wow.
Guest 1
To longitudinally follow the people that have described.
Tony Robbins
Yes. And so he took. But they put people in. They did their own study. Because I said, if we're going to do this, tell me what the standards. What are the meta studies show? Like, how many people get well through traditional approaches of drugs and therapy? You know, I don't know if you're aware of it. It's crazy. 60% of the people who use drugs or therapy to try and get out of depression make zero improvement. 60%, 40% improve, he shared with me, but the average improvement is 50%. Most are on drugs the rest of their life. And he goes, I said, you should be able to do that with a placebo. And he laughed and said, pardon me.
Guest 1
It'S true, in fact.
Tony Robbins
And he said, yeah, sort of. And I said, well, I know it sounds like hubris or arrogance, but it's not. It's just done this so long. I said, we will destroy that. I said, what's the best study you've ever done? They said it was John Hopkins. Now it's, I think it's been about eight years ago. And they gave people psilocybin, magic mushrooms and cognitive therapy for a month. I said, well, something had to change. That kind of biochemical shift, right? And it was the greatest, up until that point, the greatest result they'd ever seen in psychiatry. At the end of six weeks, 53% of the people had no symptoms whatsoever. Depression, Nothing like it in history. So I said, that's my target to beat. And I said, again, might sound arrogant, but I said, enough experience. I'd be willing to bet we do it. You set up a study with all the comparison groups. And he did, and they ran the study. And I'm proud to tell you that at the end of six weeks, 97% of people had no symptoms whatsoever. 7% had symptoms, but they lessened massively. But 17% had suicidal ideation coming in and coming out. None did. They followed up a year later. 72% reduction in negative emotions a year After I've not seen them. 51% increase in positive emotions. So now we're doing it on business. They did a one year study with 1500 people. They just finished it. And you know, in business, you know, EBITDA is engagement, right. The most engaged employees and companies are there. And we've all seen that drop. If you're not familiar with it, we usually go three levels. You measure engagement disengagement, which would be now we call it quiet quitting and then active disengagement. That's hard quitting where they're in the company but trying to harm it. The largest drop in history since COVID has happened on engagement and the largest increase in active disengagement. They took the group in 750 of each group test group versus normal group in four, excuse me, in five days they found a month later the engagement levels returned far above what they were pre Covid, but more importantly, without any more interaction with me because they changed their wiring over the next year and they follow them for the full year, they continue to increase their engagement.
Host
A lot of what you're doing is and has its roots in what we call today cbt, cognitive behavioral therapy, attribution theory. How you interpret what people are saying.
Tony Robbins
To you, that's part of it.
Host
But you also need to pause when you do have a reaction coming to you and just pausing for a second and then making sure you understand and checking the reality of that. These are techniques that you actually have in your programs.
Tony Robbins
Yes, they do. But if you also don't change the physiology of the person, you have limited range. I'll give you an example. They sent a group and followed me for.
Host
I think, I think maybe explaining the attribution there would be really good for the audience and why that's so powerful.
Tony Robbins
Well, I think if I may just limit the time, I think it's more important to understand physical change because your biochemical changes will last. If I asked you all where you were on 9 11, no matter what country you're in, even if not America, everyone knows where they were. They what they saw, who was there. Right? There's a biochemical change. I've asked you where an 8 11, you don't have a clue. So what they did is they followed me and they saw what happened to my body on stage. 12 hours a day, four days in a row, they had me wear this huge device. They took my blood and they took my saliva for hormones every hour on the hour. And they'd also done this with Tom Brady. The group has Also done this with the Tampa Lightning, who won multiple times. And what they found is what they call championship biochemistry. When Tom Brady's down by, you know, 10 points since the fourth quarter and he comes back to win, how does that happen? His biochemistry has an explosion of testosterone, which makes you remember everything. That's why it retained and it puts you in a place of total focus. But with testosterone, usually also have the stress hormone of cortisol in Tom's body. And he goes there, the cortisol drops off the cliff. It's unheard of. They call it championship. And same thing happens, Tampa. Same thing happens every time I get on stage. Not sitting like this, but of doing what we do. What's more important is they then decided to measure my audience. And they did it first before COVID and then I started doing seminars digitally all around the world. Like we have 1.3 million people for a four day seminar. I usually did 15, 20,000 person stadiums for four days. And now that's the size we're able to grow to in scale. And we figure how to make it work. Well, when they measured them in 15 different countries, it looks like music. They come in and we suddenly start to go up together. And they get the same response, same find of focus and the same cortisol drop. And that's why they believe it's lost. Same thing happens with engagement, Right? It's a biochemical. So I do believe in all the elements of cognitive therapy, the linguistic program. There's so many. But without the unique thing that they saw I did and that tried to explain how it lasted, is the biochemical shift.
Host
So pairing CBT with this physical activity, this intensity. Yes, that is the secret. Yes, that makes total sense.
Tony Robbins
Otherwise I'm left.
Host
Right.
Tony Robbins
You know, you can make it last by repetition. Right. You know, firming something.
Host
This is why when we go on a retreat and they organize these corny corporate retreats, it's not corny that they want to do a thrilling experience and go whitewater rafting to help people bond. Yes, because people's lives are so sedentary, they don't experience this. And that's why all you lunatics are jumping in ice cold baths every day. That's why you feel alive. You must have a very high like excitement level. Like you got to be in a helicopter and you got to jump in cold water to be, to feel alive.
Tony Robbins
I've been doing the 18 years in the last 10 or 12 years. Everybody does it now, but yes, no, but it's also. I'm a biohacker I have to be able to get up and do. Imagine I burn 11,500 calories on 11,300 calories on average in a day. I jump a thousand times. I'm in a stadium. I'm not just standing there. If you're standing there, you'd be bored out of your mind. I engage or I'm running up the walls. I'm there with everybody. I could strike at any moment. That's what keeps people fully alive. But when you do that, I'm jumping a thousand times. I weighed 290 pounds. Every time you come down, they explain it's four times your body weight. So it's a million pounds of pressure. And I'm doing that. I've been doing that since I was basically 19 years old. This is my 48th year doing it.
Host
If you had been diagnosed by the industrial psychological psychiatry complex these days, would they just have said you were a kid with ADHD or something?
Guest 1
What do you think?
Tony Robbins
I don't know what they'd come up with. I'm a freak as far as they're concerned. But you know what's nice now is I have virtually every psychological leader out of maybe a dozen of them have endorsed what we do. In fact, now therapists in various states in the United States can actually study my work, see the results. Because there's very few places you can see an intervention and then follow up and see what the result was a year later. And they get credits for that.
Host
If you circle back to when Tom Cruise said, hey, listen, you know, exercise, diet, meditation, and he kind of laid out there's other ways to deal with depression. And everybody would like, what does he know? These doctors know better. And now the doctors have all come back to his position, which is, let's focus on your diet, let's focus on your exercise, let's focus on your sleep.
Tony Robbins
Yes.
Host
And let's focus on your meditation. Those four things will do more to you than any pill. Correct in your estimation?
Tony Robbins
100%.
Host
Yet we have 60% of people in the country on a pill in some.
Tony Robbins
Of these, and most of them have more than one. And anytime you combine three pills, you cannot predict the outcome in your body.
Guest 1
And what about Tony then the move away from SSRIs now to psychedelics and psilocybin. It's all these cure alls.
Tony Robbins
Yes. Well, I'm sure you saw the COVID of Newsweek a couple of years ago. It talked about was on the COVID and it said, SSRIs don't work. They don't They've been proven not to work by the meta studies, but we're still giving them millions of people. And the side effects are depression, sometimes suicidal. It's insane. So looking for something else to rewire your brain is why people are starting to either mildly dose or heavily dose or go on these pieces. But the problem there is nothing wrong with anybody wants to do whatever they want to do. I'm not a prude about how to do it, but I like the idea of being able to take charge and make conscious decisions. But I've had that experience. I went and investigated that myself directly. I went down, you know, into South America and experience. It's quite profound. But it's like, what are you going to do with it? Some people, it just becomes another way to party, you know, and that then you're not going to get any results.
Host
So if you're doing it with a therapist, with intentionality, with a guide like.
Tony Robbins
I was, I was completely against it. And I met Tony Bosses from Columbia or New York University, and I said, you know, I'm just not into drugs. You know, I'm not a freak, but people around me overuse them and abuse them. So I've always just not done that. And he said, tony, it's not a drug. Because a drug you take at one, you know, you got to take it every day. He said, this, I'll show you. And he showed me videos. He said, these are people that he was working with, people that have been diagnosed with cancer, terminal cancer, right. And he said, watch this. He said, I'm going to show you in advance. This woman is an atheist. She's not like a California atheist, like there might be some God in the trees or something. She's a New York atheist. There is no God.
Host
Yeah, right.
Tony Robbins
And he shows me the video. You know, they do two different sessions. They don't know which one's going to be it. And she comes out at the session where she had the experience, and she said, I experienced God. And about 96% of the people say it's one of the three most profound experiences of life. It was for me, and I used to. I could handle anything. But the one thing I was weak at, I'll be honest with you, was like somebody dying, because I had to handle that within myself. And so that's why I went to do it. And I don't have a fear of dying. I don't want to die, but I don't have the fear of falling.
Host
And if you went through deep trauma in your childhood, psychedelics can, I'm told, take you right to that place. And you will have to confront it. And that's why doing it in a safe environment, especially if you're a child of trauma with an alcoholic father, which I had as well, very challenging.
Tony Robbins
I don't recommend going to just a guru or somebody like when I went down in South America, only because there are a lot of people that take advantage of women down there. Because once you're in that state, you know, you're really. You don't know what's. You're in a world, in a different world. So I really say, you want to. There are people now there's a big push at ucla, Stanford, Stanford, John Hopkins. And I think using it in that area make a difference. But my point is you get the same results without it. And I'm not suggesting people have to do it one way.
Host
Yeah.
Guest 1
Tony, can I build on Friedberg's question, which is happiness is sort of a rate of change problem?
Tony Robbins
Yes.
Guest 1
You're incredibly successful, you're incredibly famous, you have a great family, you're really fabulously wealthy. There's all this stuff. How do you frame your mind in terms of this rate of change? So you're seeing progress. Like, do you do that for yourself?
Tony Robbins
Like, yes, of course. I think, I think men and women, it's a generalization, but I think they evaluate life differently. I think most men have grown up in a hierarchical world. Some women do as well, and they have an idea of where they think they should be at a certain time. And most people are not there at times, or if you're fortunate enough, you're ahead of the game. I got to the point probably 10 years ago where I'd done all these things. I didn't have any less enthusiasm, but I didn't have anything that, like, what am I going to do now? And I'd done philanthropy my whole life because, you know, I got fed. So I started feeding people. I did it at 17. I fed two families and then four. And I got hooked on it. And then I got my little company involved, and then we got to 2 million people and then 2 million from me and 2 million from, you know, the general public. And then when I was writing Money Master the Game, I wrote, interviewed Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, Warren Buffett, all the best in the business. And I. I saw at the same time I'm hearing these billionaires that the government cut food stamps. Now it's called the SNAP program. Yeah. By 6, I think it was $6 billion. It means every family that needs food would have to go out with one week of food unless people like us step up. So I called my foundation. I said, how many people have I fed in my lifetime? Because I didn't know the number. They said 42 million. I was, like, really gratified by that. But I also was saying, like, what if I did what I did in a whole lifetime, in a year? What If I fed 50 million people in a year? And I was like, what if I fed 100 million? What if I fed 100 million for 10 straight years and fed a billion people? In the United States, richest country in the world, we have about 20 million people that don't know where the next meal is going to come from. And I hooked up with Feeding America to deliver the food. And I'm proud to say we did it in eight years, but the problem hasn't gone away. And so now I hooked up with Governor Beasley when I was in the uae. He introduced me to who Governor Beasley, MBZ did. And he explained to me that he.
Guest 2
Ran the World Food Program.
Tony Robbins
Yes. He won the Nobel Prize for that. And NBZ said, I want you to meet the only guy I know that's feeding more people than you. I said, he's being a lot more than I am at the un but we sat down and we became friends. And now I said to him, normally, 80 million people a year are at risk of dying. This year, it's 385 million because of the war in Ukraine. It is the breadbasket for most of Africa. And there are 11 countries near famine right now. And you don't read about in the news because you're reading about something on somebody's knuckles, right? And I said to him, well, and then there's not enough fertilizer because Russia's been cut off, and it made the price triple, and farmers can't afford it. So I said, we need a period of time to get to sustainability. Ten years, let's say. How many meals would we need in the meantime, just to close the gap? He said, Tony, 50, 60, maybe 70 billion meals. I said, why don't we do 100 billion meals challenge? I said, I did a billion meals. I did it supposed to be in 10 years. 100 million years, 100 million meals a year. I wasn't a billionaire when I started. I've been blessed, obviously. But there's got to be 99 other people like me who care, or businesses or countries. And so we began that process two and a half years ago. In the beginning it did not go well. But I'm proud to tell you, in the first year and a half, we got 30 billion meals. I'll be announcing at the UN coming up this fall. I can't tell you the numbers. I'm supposed to wait till then, but more than double that. So we're well beyond that, but right now in Darfur. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate your applause. But I think also we want sustainability in any of you that want to donate. I'll match. I do it at Feeding America. You donate a million dollars, I'll match it. You can put a $10 in, I'll match it. But now, Darfur, you know, people, you know, we get these war zones now, and there are people right now surrounded by those rebels. A million people right now, and no one's funding anything because no one can get. They'll shoot the plane out of the sky. So we just. Governor Beasley and I have just teamed up and we have found this group, this military group that's retired, that want to do good works. They've done it for a while. And we're buying the C130s. I'm donating the first million meals for the week. I got two people to match me. So we have three weeks worth of food. We're going to fly in and airdrop all that food. I'm going to UAE because I know the leaders there. We're going to Saudi Arabia. I'm going to say, you can't shoot this down. This is not political. There's no weapons. It's just food. And we're going to prove it works. And then we have a tour June 7th through the 15th with all those leaders to get them to hopefully step up. Katar has already stepped up and said they're going to give 30 million and we're going to save those lives. And so people will die otherwise, you know, and everybody just gives up. I'm not a person that gives up, but I just want to say, to answer your question, for anybody, I think we all need moonshots. It's like we all need something to go.
Guest 1
Everybody makes sense.
Tony Robbins
Yeah. You've ever achieved a goal, and then there's a drop because we're made to keep growing. And so when I did that, then it's like, okay, my wife and I, we. We found some kids that were trafficked. We couldn't believe it. And I said, I want to save as many people. City I grew in, it was 30,000 people. So now we're 76,000 kids we saved. I worked with some of the best organizations, helped make a movie some of you may have seen last year. That was two years ago. That was all about this process. And it blew up on July 4th. You know, the sound.
Guest 1
Is it hard for you to frame your mind on a goal that's measured differently than the thing that you were successful at?
Tony Robbins
What do you mean?
Guest 1
Oh, my goal is to make money, and then you make a ton of money, and then you're like, now my goal is to do something philanthropic. It's a totally different measurement. And what happens, as you said, even if you're motivated by it, a lot of the people around you may be very unmotivated by it and almost pull you back from it.
Tony Robbins
Well, I'll tell you, I've done this my whole life. I had a. Peter Gruber's our mutual friend. I think you know Peter. Great guy, Peter. One time I was arguing. I'm not arguing. Sharing with him my frustration that people weren't helping these children or helping, you know, trafficking because it. Cause it sounds so bad you don't want to hear about it. And Peter really was astute. He said, tony, he said, you taught me this. People do things for different reasons. Some people donate because they want their name on the wall. Some people donate because they're guilty, because they inherited their money. But some people donate because they really care. You don't care. Just meet their needs. And so I found, like, I had a friend that was on a plane the other day. I've known him 44 years. The person's reading my book. It's my book. I did interviewed 150 people who are the top regenerative scientists in the world, right? So it's a big book, 700 pages. This guy's marking it, and he's, you know, just going crazy. My friend loves to see how people respond. He says, so what do you think of that book? And he goes, oh, my God, stem cells and this and that. Or you can't believe what you can do with your body and change. And he goes, what do you think of the author? He goes, oh, he seems like such a nice guy. He took nothing from all his books. He donated it all. He feeds all these people, but he is rich. He said, so it must be easy for him. And my buddy turned to him and said, what if I told you I'd known Tony for 44 years? I knew him when he had $10 in his pocket, didn't know he's going to get his next meal and he gave five to a guy in the street and that he taught me, if I don't give a dollar, you know, dime out of a dollar, I'm never going to give 100 million out of a billion. And you start now, you start now and your life is different. So I invite people to find a moonshot and mine started with feeding two families and then it becomes four and then it becomes larger. But now my economics, you know, are obviously extraordinary, but what drives me now is all the things I'm doing and I need tens of millions of dollars for what I donate.
Guest 2
Let me ask you a question on that, which is how do you think about the relationship between focus and effectiveness? A lot of folks, and my experience has been the more we try and do, the more the breadth of the things we try and do, the harder it is to do any one thing exceptionally well and have these outsized returns. And there's a non linear relationship between focus and outcome. The more you concentrate your time, energy, capital on one thing, it becomes non linear. How well that thing does when you're an effective person, you have movie projects, book projects, speaking engagements, businesses, ownership and sports teams, people calling you. How do you think about focusing your time and the effectiveness that you can then have in the things that you choose to do?
Tony Robbins
I believe in concentration of power, but I don't have the limitation of thinking. It has to be every moment on just one thing. So I actually built a system for myself when I was really young and I had my first, my second business. I wasn't doing well my first one, so I started a second one. Very brilliant. It's like saying I'm terrible, parents let me have another kid. That's what most people do as entrepreneurs. So. But I knew I needed to take control of my time so I took these time management courses and they, you know, give a little book in those days and your A, B and C priorities. And I did it for about two weeks and then after a while I was like, there's no way I can do everything on my list. And I was frustrated. Who can relate to this by the way, in your own life, right? And so it's like I said, every time management system does that the same thing. I don't know if it's digital or not. You start with the same question. Now thinking is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions. Now as I said that, you're going to think and you're going to ask yourself is that true or not? And you're going to evaluate it through your references and that's a question, isn't it? And we could take you all the way down the line, but for simple sake, the question of what do I need to do? Is the wrong question. So I will tell you this. When President Clinton said what should I do? And I taught myself something different. I said I need to control my focus, concentrate it, but I also need to have purpose behind it because, you know, purpose is stronger than object. I'm going to make a billion dollars. For what though? The purpose, that's where the energy and the fuel is. And then you do a map, I called it RPM. Like increasing your RPMs to get from here to there. And you know, the result. Then I ask him what I want, what's the result? Measurable, why am I doing it? And then what's the map? The massive action plan. And then I go find the 20% of things will give me 80% of the progress. And then I put things in categories. I have companies in categories. I have my family life in a category, My body's in a category. And every week I prov. Predetermine what are the most important outcomes for the week. But when you do that, you are able to have that concentration of power. And where I am, I'm there 1 million percent. And I found that skill of concentration doesn't have to be just one thing. If like in your businesses you get great leaders. Obviously I couldn't do all these things myself, but when I've got great. You know, when you got partners that are extraordinary in the health area. You know, I created this company called Fountain Life and I got Peter Diamandis as my partner is a genius. I partnered with Sam Nazarian, some of you know from SPS, right. He created Mondrian and SLS hotels. And we're building 15 extraordinary luxury hotels around the world where you can go and be scanned. Are you doing too much now? I love it.
Host
You do.
Tony Robbins
You know this too much. If you love it. And I have time for my daughter, which I adore. Right. She's four years old.
Host
I'm saying it in slightly in jest because you are hyper efficient. You got this crazy energy level. There is a theory that sometimes people become a little too addicted to success and to. To improving themselves. Do you ever stop and just like enjoy the day and not try to improve everything? Do you ever stop and just like laugh and maybe enjoy some sushi and off with your friends and play some cards? Or does everything have to be the 78th millionth meal and person you saved?
Tony Robbins
No. Well, there's a part of me that's that way for sure.
Host
Really? What do you do?
Tony Robbins
No, there's a part of me, the first part, that's as crazy as you described. There's another part of me that I value love and relationship above all else.
Host
Got it.
Tony Robbins
So, like, you know, Peter's one of my dearest friends. For 35 years, he was down here in Miami, called me up and we had everything booked, I moved everything and we spent two hours just to hang out together because I love him dearly. He's 82, 83 years old right now. I don't know a better human being. He's my priority, my daughter's my priority. My outcomes change when there's something more important that's there. But I've also learned that I have to be able to turn the switch off. And I do that, and I do that. Ray Dalio is a good friend and, you know, learning to meditate was something I thought I'd never do in my life. But I've developed a simpler pattern I developed for myself in meditation. I start my days with. I have to take care of my body. And when I'm doing those things and I also, when everybody else goes to bed, that's when I get my thinking time. And so from midnight till 3 or 4 for me is usually my time to.
Guest 1
Are you like a three hour sleeper? Like a four?
Tony Robbins
No, like four and a half to five. Not ideal. Five is ideal for me, but I can certainly do that.
Guest 1
It's always been that way.
Tony Robbins
That's sort of, you know, not when I was a kid, but once I discovered my passion for, you know, you've all heard the phrase, right? The two most important days of your life. The day you're born, the day you discover what you're born for. When I discovered that the energy in my body changed radically.
Host
Think about. I'm curious. Mortality a lot. I know you're into the stem cells. You're, you know, you're. We're all getting to a certain age and we're all going to the same destination and looking back on your life and then finding meaning in that. I know some people our age start thinking about legacy. Does that, like, matter to you? And are you thinking about, hey, how many years do I have left?
Tony Robbins
I never thought of that till about 64. I'm 65 now. I never did.
Host
So just in the last year you started thinking about it.
Tony Robbins
The last year.
Host
Was there something that caused that to happen?
Tony Robbins
My daughter, I think having my daughter come along, I had her at 61.
Host
You had a daughter at 61?
Tony Robbins
Yeah, she's four years old.
Host
Four years old, wow.
Tony Robbins
So I've got a 50 year old daughter and a.
Host
Got it. I was confused by the math when you said all that. And I was asking the question because you know, in your brain it's all questions and answers.
Tony Robbins
When I was doing the math, I told my wife originally I said, we're have a kid by 50. I said, I don't want to be there at my kids high school reunion or, excuse me, graduation. And I'm 70 years old and I'll be 80 when I do that piece. But I look at people like Peter or Steve Wynn, like I have a whole group of friends that are in their 80s that are. Peter's doing more today than he did when I knew, when he was 45. And so I look at that and say, but, but you got to take care of.
Guest 1
Yeah.
Tony Robbins
And so. And there are things you don't predict. I. My eye may look a little weird to some of you and may not notice, but about three weeks ago, no, five weeks ago, I started to feel irritation in my bladder and hard time breathing was very weird. And I'm very, you know, I have a really intense way. I do hyperbaric oxygen, cryotherapy. So it's really weird for me not to have that. And so I went and got tested at Fountain Life where we have our stuff. And they found I had this massive amount of arsenic in my body. Like a 0 to 5 or something. They measure it, 50 would be off the charts. That was 345. And it was so bad. The first thing he said is you got to watch your eyes. And five days later my wow, retina detached, which can make you blind. So I went in for emergency surgery here in Miami, one of the best doctors out here. And normally you have to take the surgery and then you have to lie in your stomach for a week and not get up looking down because they put this gas behind the retina.
Guest 1
Oh my God.
Tony Robbins
But fortunately I, I, Bobby Kennedy, I put him together with Trump. He's a good friend. I called him, he got me with the top guys at two different hospitals. They said, this is the guy we get all together. And he said, I think this is not as effective. It's not like 90% effect. It's like 70. But if it works, you can. He goes, I can't imagine you lying on your stomach for seven straight days and nights, not moving. I said, I can't either. And he said, if I do this, it's like a belt around your eye, and you'll be able to sit up at least. So that was only three and a half weeks ago. And so this eye is still having some pieces. So of course, that made me pay attention. But yesterday, I operate. I found out from fountain life there is a new approach to your immune system. Because all this is coming out because my immune system was affected by these metals, by the way, all of you, if you could give yourself a gift, you should get tested for metals. There are so many metals in our food.
Host
And there's all these great blood tests you can do with fountain other services, and you can do them every six months for $500. And our doctors never told them to do us. They just would be like, oh, yeah, your blood works good.
Tony Robbins
But when you think you're aging, often what it is is poisons in your body, metals in your body. It's so crazy. So I want everybody to know about this. There's a man named Dr. Zhao, and I've seen everything. I wrote Life Force 150 of the best regenerative doctors in the world. I know them all. I've interviewed them all. This, to me, is like the number one thing to go to. So he has created this. I've done stem cells. I healed my shoulder with stem cells. I didn't have to go through surgery. But he does this, what he calls re education of your immune system. My beta cells are through the floor from all these metals. So now all the other things your body would fight off are coming through right? And my whole body was going in reaction. So I said, there is an answer. I'm going to detox. And I'm proud to tell you. And they told me it could take two years. It took five weeks. And I've got all the metals down to normal levels at least now, which I'm so thrilled about. But then what I'm going to do for my immune system. So Dr. Zhao, he's been around. He discovered the stem cells that are in the blood. Not MSC cells, but these blood cells. And he's worked 25 years to do it. I've never seen anything like it in my life. He does plasmapheresis, you probably have heard of it, where they take blood out and they put it through a filter. And it can be very useful. I've had that before. But what he does, he takes your blood through and he takes your white blood cells, your immune system out overnight. He puts it through a filter. With cord stem cells, you don't actually put someone else's cord stem cells in you. It's the intelligence that gets transferred, and then it puts it back in your body, and then they spread and change your immune system back 20 years. That sounds like a ridiculous promotion. This guy's not a promoter at all. And it's all science. But I watched what got me to go there is my. One of the people like Helen, Dr. Helen from our place, the fountain life, showed me. She said, tony, I think that's what you got to do. Showing this ALS patient. ALS is usually, you know, it's a. It's a death sentence. And this guy's shaking. He can't take his hands above here. He does the process. Three weeks later, he's doing this. No exaggeration. They do type 1 diabetes and turn it around. Any autoimmune disease is there. And most of aging is really the breakdown of the immune system. That's why we're seeing so many cancers. After Covid and the injections, A lot of young people, these turbo cancers are happening because their immune systems have been harmed. And so now everything starts to shake up. When people think about aging, it's really immune system. So the type of people are going with alopecia, where they have no hair. This woman, I met her, she got a full. And she's 70 years old, got all her hair back. It's in New Jersey. And he's already at. He's on an ind, so he's on stage three, though. He's gone through his stage three. He's doing a submittal. And we're gonna bring it to fountain life here because there's nothing like. I've seen it, but there are things like that, like, if you stay well, take care of yourself. Now, over the next five to 10 years, the kinds of transformations are gonna allow us to be in a position where every year, you could be a year younger or at least maintain where you are. I mean, it's not. Freeberg is. It's not science fiction.
Host
Freeberg talks about this all the time in the show. Like, we're like this very interesting generation. We're 10 years behind you, or maybe 15 in some cases, but. Or even 20, actually, I think. But we're this generation that we actually might get to benefit from some of these incredible technological advancements.
Tony Robbins
You absolutely will.
Host
Ladies and gentlemen, Tony Robbins.
Tony Robbins
Thank you so much.
Host
Bring it in.
Guest 3
Thanks for tuning in to this amazing episode we had with Tony Robbins, and thank you, Tony Robbins, for joining us, our new bestie here at all in. If you want to come to our next event. It's the All In Summit in Los Angeles. Fourth year for All In Summit. Go to all in.comevents to apply. A very special thanks to our new partner, OkX. The new money app. OkX was the sponsor of the McLaren F1 team which won the race in Miami thanks to Hyder and his team. An amazing partner and an amazing team. We really enjoyed spending time with you and OKX launched their new crypto exchange here in the us. If you love all in, go check them out. And a special thanks to our friends at Circle. They're the team behind usdc. Yes, your favorite stablecoin in the world. USDC is a fully backed digital dollar redeemable one for one for USD. It's built for speed, safety and scale. They just announced the Circle Payments Network. This is enterprise grade infrastructure that bridges the gap between the digital economy and outdated financial reality. Go check out USDC for all your stablecoin needs. And special thanks to my friends including Shane over at Polymarket, Google Cloud, Solana and bvnk. We couldn't have done it without y' all.
Host
Thank you so much.
Tony Robbins
We'll let your winners ride.
Host
Rain Man David Sass. We open source it to the fans.
Tony Robbins
And they've just gone crazy with it.
Host
Love you Queen of Kin.
Guest 3
Besties are gone.
Tony Robbins
That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.
Guest 1
Oh man, my habit will meet me at. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just huge. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
Host
We need to get murky.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg Episode: Tony Robbins | All-In Live from Miami Release Date: June 19, 2025
In this captivating episode of the All-In Podcast, industry veterans Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg engage in a profound conversation with renowned life coach and motivational speaker Tony Robbins. Filmed live from Miami, the discussion traverses Robbins' personal journey, his transformative approaches to psychology and self-help, societal perceptions of happiness, innovative mental health treatments, and his expansive philanthropic endeavors.
The episode kicks off with light-hearted banter about Tony Robbins' imposing physical presence, setting a relaxed and engaging tone for the conversation.
Tony Robbins delves into his early influences, particularly highlighting his mentorship under Jim Rohn, which laid the foundation for his career in self-help and personal development.
Robbins emphasizes the significance of recognizing and utilizing patterns to overcome chaos and achieve personal growth. He articulates how mastering patterns enables individuals to anticipate and create meaningful changes in their lives.
Highlighting his work with elite figures, Robbins shares anecdotes about assisting President Clinton and prominent athletes like Serena Williams and Tom Brady, showcasing his ability to drive significant emotional and psychological transformations.
The conversation shifts to societal well-being, where Robbins discusses how modern social media influences expectations and perceptions of happiness among younger generations. He contrasts this with historical perspectives, emphasizing the importance of progress over static achievements.
Robbins introduces his innovative approach to mental health, focusing on rewiring the brain through immersive seminars. He references a collaboration with Stanford University, where his methods demonstrated significant reductions in depressive symptoms.
Addressing traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), Robbins differentiates his approach by incorporating physical activity to induce lasting biochemical changes, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of psychological interventions.
The discussion highlights the synergy between physical exertion and mental transformation. Robbins explains how intense physical activities during his seminars facilitate profound psychological shifts, creating what he terms "championship biochemistry."
Robbins shares his personal regimen, which includes burning approximately 11,500 calories daily and engaging in strenuous physical activities. He describes himself as a "biohacker," continuously optimizing his body's performance to sustain his high energy levels.
A critical examination of current mental health treatments ensues, with Robbins highlighting the limitations of SSRIs and advocating for alternative approaches like immersive seminars and, cautiously, psychedelics under professional guidance.
Robbins passionately outlines his ambitious philanthropic goals, including the "100 Billion Meals Challenge." Collaborating with global leaders, he aims to address severe hunger crises exacerbated by geopolitical conflicts and environmental challenges.
The hosts probe Robbins on managing multiple high-impact projects. Robbins elucidates his strategy of concentrating power without limiting himself to a single task, leveraging exceptional leadership and categorizing his endeavors to maintain effectiveness across various domains.
Despite his relentless drive, Robbins emphasizes the paramount importance of personal relationships. He shares how he prioritizes time with close friends and family, illustrating his ability to balance intense professional commitments with meaningful personal connections.
In a candid moment, Robbins discusses his recent health scare involving arsenic poisoning and subsequent retinal detachment. He credits advanced regenerative medicine and his proactive approach to health management, underscoring the importance of constant self-care and medical innovation.
As the episode concludes, Robbins leaves listeners with an inspiring call to action, urging everyone to undertake "moonshots" — ambitious goals that drive meaningful change both personally and societally.
Personal Transformation: Robbins' methods integrate physical activity with psychological strategies to facilitate enduring personal growth.
Societal Impact: Addressing modern challenges like social media-induced dissatisfaction and mental health crises through innovative, scalable solutions.
Philanthropy with Purpose: Ambitious goals aimed at eradicating hunger and improving global welfare, driven by a commitment to give beyond personal success.
Health and Longevity: Emphasis on regenerative medicine and proactive health measures to enhance quality of life and extend longevity.
Tony Robbins: "If you want to take the island, you burn the boats."
[00:05]
Tony Robbins: "Progress equals happiness. If you are growing, if you are going at something, it gives you aliveness."
[09:38]
Tony Robbins: "Without energy, nothing changes. But you can't just have energy. You need strategy."
[07:40]
Tony Robbins: "What is life going to give me versus 'don't ask what you're going to do, but how do you serve.'"
[13:14]
Tony Robbins: "When you have something to give, that's when life feels more meaningful."
[10:34]
This episode offers a deep dive into Tony Robbins' philosophies and practices, illustrating his multifaceted approach to personal development, societal betterment, and relentless pursuit of impactful change. Listeners gain valuable insights into achieving sustained happiness, optimizing mental health, and the power of setting and pursuing grandiose philanthropic goals.